WHEN THE DEVIL WAKES UP EARLY

EDWIN KIPTANUI CHIRCHIR edchirchir@yahoo.com edchirchir85@gmail.com


PHOTO CREDIT: PIXABAY


There are days you wake up in the morning and you sense that the Devil is alive, kicking and seriously working on your case. Take for example recently when I woke up at 8:30 am feeling like it was on a Saturday, only to discover that it was on a Wednesday! 

I almost wept  and you all know that because of his pride, an African man rarely weeps because he has been made to believe that weeping is unmanly.

With the painful and outright disgusting realization that it was Wednesday, came the realization that I was late for work and the lesson I was supposed to attend to was already halfway through. Since I teach grownups who carry mobile phones to class, it was only natural that the moment I switched on my phone, I should find a few missed calls from my students and a number of messages to go with them, messages which screamed, "Sir, we are waiting for you!" or "please, we have a lesson. Are you coming?"

What follows next for me is an attempt to salvage a situation which kept mutating from bad to worse and then worst! I quickly warm some water on the gas burner but as I carry the hot water to the bathroom, I trip and spill all of it on the dusty floor and that leads to another task which involves getting a rag and mopping the flooded floor and after that, being contented with cold water for a shower and for those of you who have been to Eldoret, you know how torturous and traumatizing it is to take a cold shower during the cold season.

I still end up in the bathroom, but this time with cold water and some 'obese' Geisha soap. I predictably and cautiously start by washing my head and immediately I finish applying soap all over my hair and face, the Geisha soap slips out of my hands, into the toilet bowl and down the drain. In the ensuing commotion, as I try to save the soap, I accidentally step on the basin and -oops!- the water spills again.

I blindly fumble around and open the water tap to fetch more water, only to realize that ELDOWAS (the company supplying us with water) has already started their routine, but unfortunate water rationing.  I fumble around somemore to find a towel to wipe off the now, almost drying soap from my hair and face.

It is now evident that I will not make it for the first lesson. I sit on my bed,  take a deep breath and try to calm down and re-evaluate my life's goals. I would really have loved to cry at this point but then, men do not cry, do they?

I thereafter try to make some tea and as the teapot is humming beautifully in unison with the boiling tea, I realize that I have no sugar. I could have sworn by my knees that I bought sugar just the other day. There was no way I could have run out of sugar that soon. As I frantically search for the sugar on the shelf above the gas burner, I accidentally knock down a container containing salt and it lands right inside the tea pot. Apparently, I had not replaced the lid of the salt container as tightly as it should be and I ended up with salty tea. That technically meant that the mission to make tea had officially been aborted.

But there was some consolation. I could still take my bread without tea. I reach out for the cotton bag containing the bread, my last hope for the day, only for a dirty and well fed rat to emerge and disappear into some small crack on one corner of the room. Apparently, the bastard and his relatives had been feeding on my bread for the whole night. I lost my appetite.

I was left stranded, with no breakfast and no water to shower. It was also impossible for me to get water from my neighbours (those who had water tanks in their houses) because all of them had already left to run their various errands.


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BOYS AND DOLLS

EDWIN KIPTANUI CHIRCHIR edchirchir@yahoo.com edchirchir85@gmail.com

You may think this is important, that it will change your life and make you the next multi-millionaire, that it will improve your relationship with your spouse, that it will help you bring up an ideal boy child but no! It will do none of these things. I actually want to waste your time with some meaningless banter about my boys. You see, whenever I am alone and silent (of course I cannot be alone and loud), I like to think while scratching my head, which is threatening to lose hair anytime from now or scratching my scanty beard. One such thought is about 'Boys and Dolls.' 

You see (sorry for using these words again) I do not know who gave my boys the above dolls. I am told that they received them from some shy and giggling High School girls, who were out to extend their hands of friendship to the boys and to buy their loyalty. Too bad for them because should they ask me I would tell them that the only way to buy the boys' loyalty is by assuring them of an endless supply of yoghurt with an emphasis on vanilla flavour or getting them some proud looking toy cars. 

So, having received the dolls and the High School girls having gotten their short lived loyalty and half hearted, cautiously delivered hugs minus kisses, the boys seemed to have no idea what to do with them and instead of calling them dolls, they contemptuously referred to them as 'zile vitu' (those things). The ideal situation should have been the dolls being pampered, breast fed using imaginary breasts and covered  with warm clothing but none of these happened. Instead, the boys gave the dolls a rough treatment by turning them into permanent and  involuntary passengers in some make shift vehicles, improvised from some plastic soda bottles.

When not being ignored with reckless abandon, the dolls would endure long hours of being driven around the house and outside under the scorching sun  with no sympathy, empathy or compassion whatsoever. I mean, I thought they would at least treat them like human beings, even though they are not human, hence hence granting them a chance to learn how to have some semblance of tender feelings towards fellow human beings, but I do not know, may be I am just being irrational by rushing them into developing qualities the are not yet ready for. You see (oops! there you go again), someone told me we should treat children as children and not small adults. (please, clap for your self if you are still reading this article at this point and if you manage to finish it, get yourself a drink at your expense).

When the dolls are not traveling to nowhere in particular, they also endure   long periods of being squeezed on their bellies because the manufactures in their wisdom, decided to put somethings on their flat and bare behinds which produce funny sounds. These sounds would have otherwise been entertaining was it not for the fact that the boys almost always choose to squeeze their bellies when I am watching serious things like the endless but important squabbles common in Kenyan news.

  On the contrary, when the boys' beautiful girlfriends (yes, they do have girlfriends in case you are wondering) are around, the dolls are pampered by being washed and covered well, sometimes being breastfed using unproductive breasts and being weaned. The manner in which the girls treat the dolls is the extreme opposite of how the boys treat them. The girls are too tender on the dolls and even reprimand the boys when they mishandle them. It makes me wonder what would happen if child care was entirely left to men, that is if all ladies left for Venus, leaving their babies behind.


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EDWIN KIPTANUI CHIRCHIR edchirchir@yahoo.com edchirchir85@gmail.com





IMAGE CREDIT: PIXABAY

Article 81 (b) of the Constitution of Kenya states that 'Not more than two - thirds of the members of elective public bodies shall be of the same gender.'

The problem is, how do you conduct elections in such a manner that you are in line with the gender rule, without infringing on the citizens' democratic rights? Do you set aside some counties or constituencies purely for women? No. It will still amount to infringement of the rights of the people to elect the leaders they desire.

So, what do we do? The most reasonable way would be to nominate more women where there is a shortage but then, it resurrects that ugly ogre called the Wage Bill.

Assuming for example that we have 300 members of the National Assembly, with women being a minority then, in order to be in line with the Two Thirds Gender Rule, we should have at least 100 women out of the 300. Anything less than that and the Institution (Parliament) becomes unconstitutional meaning we have to nominate more women and incur more costs.

Another scenario: assuming we elect 250 men out of the 300 members of the National  Assembly, it will mean that we have violated the constitution because we now have 83% of the members of parliament being men instead of the required 67% (2/3 or less). This means we will have to nominate approximately 73 more women to sort out the constitutional mess and by doing that, the tax payer suffers.

But then, the main reason why we need more women in parliament is so that their voices can be heard and issues attended to. How can their voices be heard? Their voices can be heard through their votes for or against bills in parliament. Can their voices be heard without nominating more women? Yes. In a situation where women are less than 1/3 of the members of parliament, we should double or triple the votes held by each woman, in order to match the single vote held by each man.

Back to the scenario above, in the case where you have 250 men out of 300 parliamentarians. Instead of nominating 73 more women, we should just triple the votes held by each woman so that now we have 100 more 'ghost' female parliamentarians, who are not being paid by the tax payer. That way, their voices can be heard without a huge pay bill. So, how will they vote for or against a bill? Each woman gets 3 ballot papers and each man gets 1 ballot paper, which means parliament needs to drop that style of voting by shouting 'I' or 'Neigh' because it cannot work in this case.

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